Every June and July Daisy Yellow/ Tammy Garcia / gypsy999 posts 61 prompts for you to follow. The suggestion is that you make small index card pieces. This year I am enjoying the digital collages so much I am continuing with those.

The first week of prompts are all about fairgrounds:

Roller coaster

Fireworks

Tilt-a-whirl

Ferris Wheel

Queue/ line

Carousel

Haunted house

I am having great fun blending using image blender, using found images (some from the internet ) and adding cutouts using the Freemix App.

I follow Shelley on social media and loved doing her paper collage challenge a couple of years ago. I liked the idea of working digitally. I don’t have photoshop or an equivalent software so I use Apps on my phone. I usually use Image Blender. Shelley suggested Freemix so I downloaded it.

Initially it wouldn’t work so I made the first few using Image Blender. I like it as an App it doesn’t crash and you can build up layers using the ‘flatten’ option when you save. It’s a bit clunky on my IPhone6 using the masking tool because my fingers feel huge on the screen, but you can zoom in and make the tool very fine.

I have been using my photographs and found images to make these and added my mandala drawings to add my ‘stamp’ on them – I like the individuality I can achieve working this way, but I wanted to learn how to use Freemix.

Freemix is also very easy to use. You work in layers and there is a vast database of images to use. I haven’t found out how to search it yet. So you have to trawl through looking for images. I have found this cuts down on the intuitive element a bit but I am feeling happier working with it after a couple of goes and I worked out how to add my own images too

Again working with it on my phone feels a little clunky, I need to see if working on my iPad would be more effective. Some of the ladies on the challenge are producing lovely collages with more depth and sensitivity. Though I think the middle one above it getting there. I discovered how to make the images more transparent – that helps

2 years ago my son was in a road accident in South Korea – this week my daughter was poorly with asthma and flu and had to go to hospital. I am doing an initial counselling course and found it very difficult to do an empathy exercise with another student.

My irritable bowel has also been playing up, so all my emotional stuff is roiling around my stomach. I wanted to see if I could work through all the rubbish visually to see if that helped

I started off having flash backs after Face book reminded me that I was in Korea 2 years ago. My son was not really in any critical danger but he did fracture his skull in 3 places. So I went to Korea. It was a difficult time as you can imagine.

I came up with this image as a starting point after searching for flash backs in google images

Here are some more I found interesting

I decided to start messing about digitally with a couple of these to see what I came up with – this is how I usually work. I liked the scribble and the spiral

Unfortunately when I worked in my journal I didn’t do a step by step, but after a series of layers this is what I came up with.

You can’t really see the resemblance to the original images. I started off with a spiral clock doodle and then added layers of pattern, text , and a big loose scribble. I tried adding a lady in the middle but it didn’t seem to convey what I was feeling. however I liked the phrase ‘in the eye of a storm’ so an eye seemed more appropriate.

After lunch I doodled while waiting in a cafe, for a friend. Typically I forgot paper, but I had a pen. A few companies produce nice weight paper advertising leaflets which were on display at the cafe, so I decided to appropriate a diary to work on.

It helped to situate the doodle in a time frame of Feb/ March to anchor my thoughts. I like the look of asemic writing – what I use is technically not that – I write on top of my words a couple of times to hide the meaning from the reader – so I write out all my feelings but you can’t read it.

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content,” or “without the smallest unit of meaning.” With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret’ (Wikipedia)

Suddenly – just like that, it’s all about chimneys and architecture ……

And then – I am spending ages on my iPhone layering and fiddling in my apps – making my self bug eyed and just a bit obsessed (again) if you ask me ….

At least some of these are taken and played with outside, wandering Edinburgh getting some fresh air (lol) – anyone watching me must have thought I was doing a window or door survey ……..

And I notice I am doing a bit of painting – though still architecturally based

And then there are those that I deleted

Apps I love using :

Image blender, where you can layer two images , mask , arrange and change filters

Prisma – adds arty filters to your work , my favourite is ‘Heisenberg’ – which has an image of Richard Cranston in role, as its logo ( so I get to break bad and change my art into stylised cartoons , with the press of a button)

The filters on the iPhone camera – particularly ‘Exposure’ ( my phone never uses the correct exposure automatically? ) and some thing called ‘black point’ which are part of the ‘light’ menus

I don’t know if it’s my age, menapause , or just the fact that I haven’t recovered from my California jaunt ( we have been back over a week) but I am not sleeping well and was up at 6am wide awake playing with my iPhone ( again) I only went to bed at 1am…..

Morning routine – tea, check face book, email and Instagram feed.

If that hasn’t put me back to sleep , then I play with my apps .

To day it was manipulating my TV doodle from last night – which was ridiculously intricate

I tried reflecting it but the shape was too round and the results too flat

I wanted to add colour without any real effort – so I layered it with another set of doodles from this week using Imageblender and finishing it off in Snapseed

It was still only about 6.30am

I fancied layering this with a photo with good contrast- so I checked back with some of my California pictures ( I can’t quite believe I can say that)

Oakland bridge

Then I couldn’t resist reflecting it

Still too early to get up ….

I remembered my image from Sacremento airport – Imageblender and into Prisma

Layout

And back into Reflection , using the invert colour filter , rotate and then layout in Instagram , finally a yawn ……

We are doing lots of fetching and carrying this week as my family arrived in California for the son’s wedding- today my Dads flight was delayed so I played about with my reflection in a glass lift/ shiny floor at Sacremento Airport terminal A.

I walked away from the lift shaft towards the window on the other side of the building taking photos- I had to time it getting the fewest number of other people in shot

I liked the way the floor and the lights added to the reflection and how my figure distorted.

I wanted to overlay them to see if I could get a better feeling of time and space

This one lost the sense of the figure – I layered it with the largest one first

You can still see the smaller figures inside the larger one – I liked this layout much more